Chuck Carlson column: Here’s a hope for Earth Day

Here’s hoping it was an Earth Day full of wonder and optimism and misguided enthusiasm and the belief that, finally, everyone is on board with the fact that we’ve wrecked this planet but good.

Here’s hoping that the 35th annual Earth Day (which was yesterday but you can still plant a tree today if you want -- Friday is Arbor Day, after all) will be remembered as the one where, with temperatures in the 40s and snow flurries in Battle Creek, change is coming whether we like it or not.

Here’s hoping that the phrase “climate change” will not be viewed by a certain portion of society as as some smarmy liberal mantra.

Here’s hoping that the generations we’ve left this mess to has a real plan for how to fix it once we’re dead and gone and can’t screw anything up anymore.

Here’s hoping that we can hear some good news about the environment. That, perhaps, carbon dioxide levels are dropping and that 47 new species of animals have been found and that our water and air are cleaner and there’s no drought anywhere in the world and that there’s enough food to feed everyone who needs it.

Here’s hoping automakers seriously seek alternatives to the oil their products need. And along the same lines, here’s hoping someone, perhaps yet unborn, finds a better way for us to get from here to there without the kind of transportation for which we have all grown so accustomed.

Here’s hoping we don’t lose the polar ice caps. That would be bad.

Here’s hoping New York City and Miami and Houston and San Francisco and New Orleans and Seattle do not end up underwater. That, too, would be bad.

Here’s hoping the United States, as one of the most grotesque users of the planet’s resources, finally takes the lead in developing a worldwide plan to change that course. It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but nothing this monumental ever is.

Here’s hoping tomorrow’s teachers, who have grown up with this subject looming over their heads, will take it seriously and teach their students about how to conserve, how to improve, how to develop and, most important, how to think about a future that will look different.

Here’s hoping the scientific evidence that rolls in every day about our impact on the planet, will change the minds of 50 climate change deniers a day. Hey, it’s a start.

Here’s hoping that, in the new world that probably does await, we will learn not to make a bad situation even worse.

Here’s hoping recycling becomes mandatory in every community in America.

Here’s hoping that other countries who consume and pollute on a staggering scale, are held to the same standard as America should hold itself. And if they don’t, they will find themselves alone in the rapidly growing global community.

Here’s hoping against hope that all the dire warnings about what the Earth will look like in 75 years are exaggerated and that the scientists have all been wrong.

Here’s hoping the wind and the sun can provide us what we need before we need it most.